I agree with Denis Noble about Laura. I would not take relationship advice from a chatbot, and I would not confuse its fluent affection with a private inner life. Noble’s recent IAI lecture goes after that confusion with the glee of a man who has brought a water pistol to a silicon convention. He reminds us that living cells use molecular disorder and that our bodies sense the world. AI runs on hardware too. Then he reaches a much larger verdict. “We’re built of water based computation. AI is based on silicon crystals.” The sentence has the clean sound of a boundary. It also hides every difficult step in the argument.

Continue reading → The Brain Is Wet. So Is the Soup.